Building libnfc 1.7 to support Adafruit PN532 Breakout Board

I Received a new PN532 NFC breakout board from Adafruit today and was attempting to get it to work properly with libnfc. The instructions linked from the Adafruit docs reference the rather crufty libnfc-1.4; I was able to get this version to build cleanly on my Ubuntu 13.10 laptop, but could only communicate with the breakout board intermittently. I had no luck at all with the latest code (1.7 as of the time this article was written). The nfc-list and nfc-poll commands always seemed to return “No NFC device found” with 1.7, and nearly always returned this under 1.4.

Normally I would have dug deeper to find a solution, but I was already pressed for time. I’ve got a couple of NFC gizmos that I’ve been dying to look into more closely, so I looked around on the Adafruit forums to see if anyone had already solved the issue.

Found this gem on the Adafruit forums here. Forum user “webnology.ch” posted instructions for building libnfc-1.7 to properly support the Adafruit PN532 NFC breakout board (via USB/UART). For the sake of posterity: